Covered California’s foreseeable rollout problems: Editorial

People get information during a rally for Covered California, the state run market exchange for health care insurance at Union Station in Los Angeles Tuesday, October 1, 2013. The rally was held to help kick off open enrollment for those eligible uninsured who qualify to enroll in affordable health care.(Photo by Hans Gutknecht/Los angeles Daily News)

Covered California did a good job of exuding an aura of competence before the first day of the Affordable Care Act.

On Tuesday, when the online signups for Obamacare began and the state’s overseer of the new health plan announced that the computer system was a bit slow in the face of 5 million Web hits, anyone who knows systems was sympathetic. Unexpectedly high demand putting a strain on the system was a welcome problem.

But then administrators said, oops; there was a “communications error,” and that 5 million number was way off. Only about 514,000 actual Californians attempted to go to the coveredca.com website Tuesday, and many of them weren’t happy with their experience. That kind of online traffic wasn’t out of line with expectations of a curious and concerned populace of the nation’s largest state checking out the much-anticipated plan rates promised in the rollout of Obamacare. But even that was too much. The site had to be shut down for two hours Wednesday afternoon for fixes. But even on Thursday there were page-loading problems.

It was a tremendously disappointing debut. The folks at Covered California have to do a better job — and they have to do it now.

The clogged computer system and the half-hour waits for information on the telephone reflect bad planning. Fix the system, and hire more people if that’s necessary.

Even (or perhaps especially) Obamacare supporters were prepared for unanticipated glitches. But giving out an inaccurate hit count and allowing the system to crash aren’t bugs; they are errors that should have been anticipated and prevented.

Accommodating thousands of online visitors isn’t difficult; it just takes better planning. This rollout so far doesn’t reflect well on Covered California.

Commenters on newspaper websites were livid. “The roll out has hit ‘SOME snags!!!’ ” snarled one with the online name of Fast Freddy. “That is like saying there are SOME fish in the ocean. It is day 2 and the system still crashes every time I try to log in to my account. Officials like to talk about how many people are accessing the system, but are silent about how many people have been able to actually sign up. I’m betting it is very few.”

While officials did say that the first Californian was signed up under the ACA by 8:46 a.m. Tuesday, they are declining to release overall enrollment figures immediately and may hold off until December to do so. It’s hard to understand the reason for such secrecy other than to prevent the release of bad news.

At the same time, it’s worth noting that Obamacare opponents who cite these problems as symptoms of the evil or inefficacy of the ACA sound more than a little desperate. Can’t have it both ways on this one. Hundreds of thousands of Californians were interested enough to flood the phones and the website on the first day the plan went live.

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The problem of access to affordable health care won’t be solved overnight even when the signup issues are addressed. While a bigger pool of the insured means a spreading-out of the costs, and thus cheaper premiums, there are already devilish details. Because no one can be denied coverage under the new law, the pool of people eligible for insurance includes a larger number of sicker people. Supporters hope the decline in emergency-room visits for illnesses like the flu by the uninsured will counterbalance that.